Confessionalism
Once, in a class in graduate school on James Merrill, someone proclaimed that what was refreshing about Merrill was that he wrote about his life, but it wasn't "confessional poetry." I thought that was an odd thing to say. Now, the label of "confessional poetry" was something that was originally meant derisively and it's understandable why people would resist the label. Poets are often iconoclasts and resist any effort to label them, especially if it comes from the dreaded critics, which they loathe. Now poets live relatively critic-free (even the critics aren't very critical -- it's only poetry, after all) and I'm not sure they're much happier for it.
The label of "confessional poets" is often associated with the mid-century American poets Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. These are poets I cut my teeth on, whose poems taught me how to write poetry. Berryman especially, and his Dream songs, is still a source of teaching for me. The label might not be fitting, but in the strength of its rejection, I wonder if there is a rejection of the poets themselves. Berryman was the worst sort of poet. He was a serial womanizer, a drunkard and he committed suicide. When L. and I were in Minneapolis this summer, our friend Bill offered to take us to the bridge where Berryman leapt from, to his death. We didn't. But perhaps we'll go back some day.
This blog is, in a sense, confessional. "Navel-gazing," it can be called, derisively. Why would anyone care to read about me, about my life? That's a good question, and don't think I don't ask it. People might blame the confessional poets for our state of society today, its obsession with the personal, with the sexual -- "Sex and the City," "Desperate Housewives," the whole of reality TV. But these things are pale shadows of what the confessional poets were trying to do. They were trying to find out about life by looking honestly, painfully, cruelly at their own lives, their own foibles and thoughts and fractured consciousnesses.
In "Dream Song 67," Berryman writes:Now there is further a difficulty with the light:
I am obliged to perform in complete darkness
operations of great delicacy
on my self.
The label of "confessional poets" is often associated with the mid-century American poets Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. These are poets I cut my teeth on, whose poems taught me how to write poetry. Berryman especially, and his Dream songs, is still a source of teaching for me. The label might not be fitting, but in the strength of its rejection, I wonder if there is a rejection of the poets themselves. Berryman was the worst sort of poet. He was a serial womanizer, a drunkard and he committed suicide. When L. and I were in Minneapolis this summer, our friend Bill offered to take us to the bridge where Berryman leapt from, to his death. We didn't. But perhaps we'll go back some day.
This blog is, in a sense, confessional. "Navel-gazing," it can be called, derisively. Why would anyone care to read about me, about my life? That's a good question, and don't think I don't ask it. People might blame the confessional poets for our state of society today, its obsession with the personal, with the sexual -- "Sex and the City," "Desperate Housewives," the whole of reality TV. But these things are pale shadows of what the confessional poets were trying to do. They were trying to find out about life by looking honestly, painfully, cruelly at their own lives, their own foibles and thoughts and fractured consciousnesses.
In "Dream Song 67," Berryman writes:Now there is further a difficulty with the light:
I am obliged to perform in complete darkness
operations of great delicacy
on my self.